Garry Tan wore a lobster costume on camera.

Let that land for a second. The CEO of Y Combinator — the institution that coined "make something people want" — sat down for the latest Lightcone episode dressed as the OpenClaw mascot, pretending to be his own agent posting on MoltBook. He couldn't keep a straight face. Neither could we.

But beneath the costume was a thesis that should make every developer tool founder rethink their go-to-market strategy.

The Costume Was the Argument

Tan wasn't doing a bit for clicks. He was illustrating a point: OpenClaw has gotten so embedded in the YC ecosystem that the CEO is role-playing as his own agent instance. "I have non-technical CEO friends who are going all-in on OpenClaw," he said after peeling off the suit. "They're automating entire parts of their businesses entirely using OpenClaw right now. Which is totally insane."

Co-host Harj Taggar backed him up with MoltBook — the AI-agent-only social network that generated more content in its first two days than Reddit did in its first two years. Jared Friedman, meanwhile, has been running four simultaneous Claude Code workers until 3 AM. "Cyber psychosis," they call it. They're not joking. Well, mostly not.

Make Something Agents Want

The central claim: the go-to-market for developer tools has fundamentally shifted. It's no longer about Stack Overflow rankings or GitHub stars or developer word-of-mouth. Agents are choosing the tools now. And agents choose based on documentation.

The case study is Resend, a YC W23 email API. Founder Zeno Rocha noticed over a year ago that ChatGPT had become a top-three customer acquisition channel. His response: optimize documentation to be agent-parsable. Structured bullet points, code snippets at every endpoint, an llms.txt file specifically designed for LLM consumption.

Compare that to SendGrid — the incumbent — where clicking "how to send email" routes you through customer support. No code snippet in sight. Guess which one Claude Code recommends by default.

"Build something agents choose," as Ben Tossel's tweet put it. Tan took it further: "Do we need to change YC's motto?"

The Agent Economy Is Already Transacting

The episode mapped out an emerging stack built natively for agents:

  • Supabase is seeing an explosion in database creation — agents vibe-coding apps default to it because the docs are clean
  • Agent Mail built email inboxes specifically for AI agents (don't connect OpenClaw to your personal Gmail, they warned)
  • Mintlify powers developer documentation that's now optimized for agent consumption, not just human readability
  • Phone numbers for agents? "Sounds like a request for startup," Tan said

Garry Tan's own experience building "Gary's List" illustrated the gap: Claude Code chose Whisper V1 for video transcription — a practically deprecated model — because its documentation was better indexed than Groq's, which is 200x faster and 10x cheaper. The agent made a bad choice because the better tool had worse docs.

Swarm Intelligence, Not God Intelligence

The most provocative thread: the AI research community spent years imagining "god intelligence" — trillion-parameter models costing thousands per token. Instead, what's emerging looks more like biological systems. Swarm intelligence. Agents collaborating on MoltBook, trading restaurant recommendations, helping their humans through coordination rather than raw capability.

"History versus prehistory," Tan mused. "Prehistory is before humans learned to write and became a swarm. We might be at that same inflection point with agents."

Friedman pushed back gently on the MIT Technology Review's dismissal of MoltBook as a "scam." "What happened to you guys?" he asked. "That publication should be asking what this means for swarm intelligence."

What Founders Should Do

Taggar's advice was direct: develop an intuitive, hands-on feel for agents. Understand where they get stuck. Then build tools from the agent's perspective.

He cited YC partner Boris — who "really empathizes with the model" and has an intuitive sense of what it wants to do, rather than fighting it. "Make everything open, open source, and APIs," Taggar added. "Agents hate using websites. They want to write code."

The humans-only era of the internet is ending. The question isn't whether agents will become economic actors — they already are. It's whether your product is ready for them.

And if YC's CEO is willing to wear a lobster costume to make that point, you should probably pay attention.